Tag: ECU

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Reasons to be cheerful ….. pt3

A tickle round the mountain, five logged files and two and a half hours of logging later …. it’s no longer a work in progress, it’s a runner!

It may only be a couple of weeks ago that this little project kicked off, but for the life of me, I can’t quite remember why I started, or in fact where I really thought it would lead. So I guess this is most definitely a natural end to this part in the development cycle. It starts, stops, logs and displays more than I originally intended. I guess there’s nothing more to do except get logging!

As for the other stuff on my wish list ….. well the aquisition of external info such as speed (measured not GPS), brake line pressure and gear position may well be handled by this little device. 8 x 5v analogue inputs should be fine … all looks fairly straight forward in the instruction book anyway. We’ll see!

So what have I learned from the data so far? Firstly, the air intake temperature is a fairly consistent 15ºC above the ambient air temp at all times – higher when the bike’s in stop-start traffic ….. all very power-sapping. Secondly … truthfully there isn’t a secondly just yet, but what I’m interested in looking at on the next couple of runs, is the barometric (air pressure) data. It’s measured in the airbox and with the restrictive ‘snorkel’ in place I’m expecting to see a drop in pressure at high RPM/throttle opening …. but will the data bear this out? And how much will it fluctuate by?

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Caponord Datalogger Pt2

Wow what a whirlwind learning curve the last two days have been. Thanks to a Brain that (unusually) suffered the minimum of ‘Blue Screens’ and a patient wife who put up with all the muttering, mumbling and furtive running to and fro I now have a datalogger that is receiving info from the GPS and adding it to the log.

No doubt, chicken feed – a mere stroll in the park to any reading programmers …. me, I’ve taken out a lifelong subscription for Anadin! So, deep breath, sink a beer and pencil out the next step ……. I’m starting to get a liking for this digital-crochet lark!

I’ll try and get a snippet of video to post up so you can see it working ….. or crashing, whatever it decides!

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A datalog slog

As many of you are aware, last year was a breakthrough one for Capo owners because we got the fantastic (and free!) TuneECU software. One thing we haven’t got though, is a datalogger …… the only thing I’ve seen to date is the very basic offering with the extortionately priced TuneBoy software.

One thing he did though, was supply the Visual Basic 6 source code with it – and that set the old brain cogs whirring once again. Could I turn my hand to programming and figure out how to do the job myself? Well it’s been a week or so and if I say so myself, I’m rather chuffed at the progress so far. It took a few days to get my head  even marginally around what the hell I was looking at … and a few more to port it over to a more modern (Visual Studio) software and deal with the additional problems that caused.

Anyway, here I am on a sunny Tuesday afternoon with a couple of screenshots from the little darling as it did the business with the Rally Raid.

So what’s it do?;

  • Logs RPM, throttle position, Air temperature, Engine temperature, O2 Volts, O2 Status, Cooling fan activation and Battery volts.
  • It also calculates and logs Maximum RPM, Minimum and Maximum battery voltage ( twice for minimum – starting and general running), Maximum Air Temp and throttle position.
  • The graph initially projects the complete data run and can be zoomed into for extra detail. The cursor locks onto the data plots and displays the reading from that point.

A short run - lots of O2 activity!
Eeepc 1024x700 & solid state memory, vibe resistent.
Logging
Datalogger screen on an XP machine

It looks as though data files are about 100Kb per hour in size, so storage space isn’t going to be an issue ….. unless your logging to a ZX81! There’s still more tweaks and twiddles I want to make but the majority of the work is done ….. the down side? Well, because it’s a derivative of the TuneBoy package, it uses the same modules to connect to the ECU – and therefore, needs the a TuneBoy cable. So if you haven’t got a TuneBoy cable …………………

Extra stuff I’d like to do;

  • Add GPS location/Speed data to the file from my Garmin.
  • Add a timecode or some way of keying the log to a video/audio feed.
  • Add extra analogue inputs via another USB – brakes, fuel pressure etc.
  • Tea making and cashpoint functionality ….. eh???

But of course, one step at a time …… chickens in, dogs walked and fed, play with kittens …. oh look it’s time for bed, maybe another day. Night, night.

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Bug in TuneECU 1.9.3 regarding Sagem ECU

A new version of TuneECU has been released that may well be relevant to Caponord/Futura owners. If you have recently downloaded version 1.9.3 ……. remove it as it has a bug with regards to communication to/from the ECU. A new version 1.9.4 has been released (Monday 16/05/2011) that fixes this issue, although this is untested at the time of writing.